Critical Questions Towards a Naturalized
Concept of Karma in Buddhism
By Dale S. Wright
Department of Religious Studies, Occidental College, Los Angeles,
California
wrightd@oxy.edu
ISSN 1076-9005; Volume
11, 2004
Abstract
Abstract: In an effort
to articulate a naturalized concept of karma for the purposes of
contemporary ethical reflection, this paper raises four critical
questions about the Buddhist doctrine of karma. The paper asks (1) about
the advisability of linking the concept of karma to assurance of
ultimate cosmic justice through the doctrine of rebirth; (2) about the
effects of this link on the quest for human justice in the social,
economic, and political spheres of culture; (3) about the kinds of
rewards that the doctrine of karma attaches to virtuous action, whether
they tend to be necessary or contingent consequences; and (4) about the
extent to which karma is best conceived individually or collectively.
The paper ends with suggestions for how a non-metaphysical concept of
karma might function and what role it might play in contemporary ethics.
The Buddha warned1 that
karma is so mysterious a process that it is essentially unfathomable,
declaring it one of the four topics not suited to healthy philosophical
meditation because it leads to “vexation and madness. Nevertheless, it
is essential that we engage in the processes of critical thinking about
the concept of karma, thereby taking the same risks that many Asian
Buddhists have also taken. It is important for us to do so because
Buddhist (and Hindu) teachings on karma and moral life have now entered
contemporary currents of Western thought and culture, and deserve to be
scrutinized for their potential value and weaknesses. The risk is
serious, of course, because in Asia karma is the primary concept
governing the moral sphere of culture. Westerners have faced doubts
about critical thinking in this same sphere of culture, when early
modern thinkers wondered whether moral conduct would survive critical
reflection on the concepts of theistic judgment and heavenly reward.
Most have concluded that the benefits of critical thinking about
morality outweigh the risks, and that the possibility of further
development and refinement in the sphere of human morality warrants
energetic effort.
The primary reason that
karma is a promising ethical concept for us today is that it appears to
propose a natural connection between a human act and its appropriate
consequence, or, in traditional terms, between sin and suffering, virtue
and reward. The connection requires no supernatural intervention: we
suffer or succeed because of the natural outcome of our actions
themselves, rather than through the subsequent intervention of divine
punishment or reward. Moral errors contain their own penalties as
natural consequences, and every virtue encompasses its own reward.
Although some dimensions of Western culture presuppose such an
arrangement today, it is instructive to recall that this kind of
understanding wasn’t articulated in the West until Rousseau in the
eighteenth century.2
Throughout Asia, karma
defines the ethical dimension of culture and remains the key to
understanding Buddhist morality. Karma is the teaching that tells
practitioners that it matters what they do throughout their lives, and
how they do it. It articulates a close relationship between what one
chooses to do and who or what that person becomes over time. The
extraordinary sophistication of this early concept should, in fact, be
counted as one of the most significant achievements of south Asian
culture, and an impressive gift to contemporary ethical thinking
globally.
A number of scholars3
have claimed that one of the primary contributions of Buddhism to Indian
culture was that it “ethicized” an earlier pre-ethical concept of karma
in extending it beyond the sphere of religious ritual by applying it not
just to ritual behaviors that pleased the gods but to all good acts.4
The domain of “all good
acts” is, of course, the sphere of ethics as we know it today, and the
applicability of the concept of karma to this sphere is the primary
issue of this essay. The essay is based on the thesis that a
naturalistic concept of karma, inherent in the concept as articulated in
the many Buddhist versions of it, can and should be developed, and that
with further cultivation for the emerging context of contemporary global
culture, the concept of karma could constitute a major element in the
ethical thinking of the future. Doing that, however, requires critical
thinking. This essay, therefore, raises questions about four dimensions
of the concept of karma as it has been understood in the history of
Buddhism. Each area of questioning is offered as a way to begin to hone
the concept, to separate it from elements of supernatural thinking, and
to work towards locating those elements that might be most effective
today in the domain of ethics. Following these four exercises in
critical thinking, a few suggestions are offered about the emergence of
a naturalized concept of karma.
The first dimension of
the Buddhist doctrine of karma that warrants reflective scrutiny is its
assertion of ultimate cosmic justice. All of the world’s major religions
have longstanding traditions of promise that, at some point, good and
evil lives will be rewarded with good and evil consequences, and that
everyone will receive exactly what they deserve. But all of these
religions are also forced to admit that this doctrine contradicts what
we sometimes experience in our lives. Good people may just as readily be
severely injured or die from an accident, or die early of disease, as
anyone else, and people who have lived unjustly and unfairly will not
necessarily experience any deprivation in their lives. Some people seem
to receive rewards in proportion to the merit of their lives, while
others do not. Among those who don’t appear to get what they deserve,
some seem to receive more than merit would dictate, and others, less.
That all of these
outcomes are common and unsurprising to us should lead us to question
the kind of relationship that exists between merit and reward. One way
to face this realization is to conclude, at least provisionally, that
the cosmos is largely indifferent to the sphere of human merit as well
as to our expectations of justice. If a morally sound person is no more
or no less likely to die early of a disease than anyone else, then
maturity and honesty of vision on this matter may require that we
question traditional assumptions that cosmic justice must prevail.
Although we certainly care about matters of justice, it may be that
beyond the human sphere we will not be able to find evidence of that
kind of concern.
The religious claim that
there is a supernatural connection between moral merit and ultimate
destiny may derive from our intuitive sense that there ought to be such
a connection. We all sense that there ought to be justice, even in
settings where it seems to be lacking. That the corporate criminal ought
to be punished, that the innocent child ought to live well rather than
to suffer from a devastating disease, and that some things ought to be
different from what they appear to be, are all manifestations of our
deep seated sense of justice. Virtue and reward, vice and punishment,
ought to be systematically related, and where they are not, we all feel
a sense of impropriety. But whether that now intuitive internal sense is
sufficient reason to postulate a supernatural scheme of cosmic justice
beyond our understanding and experience is an open question that has
remained as closed in Buddhism as it has in other religions. The form
that this closure takes in Buddhism is the doctrine of rebirth, which
plays the same role that heaven does in theistic traditions as ultimate
guarantor of justice. As it is traditionally conceived in Asia, karma
requires the metaphysical doctrine of rebirth to support its often
counter-experiential claims about the ultimate triumph of cosmic justice
for the individual.
The second question
about the doctrine of karma follows from the first, and is, in fact, the
primary critique that has been leveled against the idea since it has
been introduced to the West. This is that the idea of karma may be
socially and politically disempowering in its cultural effect, that
without intending to do this, karma may in fact support social passivity
or acquiescence in the face of oppression of various kinds. This
possible negative effect derives again from the link formed between
karma and rebirth in order to posit large-scale cosmic justice over long
and invisible stretches of time where other more immediate forms of
justice appear not to exist. If one assumes that cosmic justice prevails
over numerous lifetimes, and that therefore the situations of inequality
that people find themselves in are essentially of their own making
through moral effort or lack of it in previous lives, then it may not
seem either necessary or even fair to attempt to equalize opportunities
among people or to help those in desperate circumstances. For example,
if you believe that a child being severely abused by his family is now
receiving just reward for his past sins, you may find insufficient
reason to intervene even when that abuse appears to be destructive to
the individual child and to the society.
Now, of course, it is an
open question, an historical and social-psychological question, whether
or to what extent the doctrines of karma and rebirth have ever really
had this effect. We know very well that Buddhist concepts of compassion
have prominent places in the various traditions, and we can all point to
Buddhist examples of compassionate social effort on behalf of the poor
and the needy. Nevertheless, we can see where the logic of this belief
easily leads, in the minds of some people at least, and we can suspect
that it may have unjustifiably diminished or undermined concern for the
poor and the suffering in all Buddhist cultures. The link between karma
and rebirth can reasonably be taken to justify nonaction in the
socio-economic and political spheres, and may help provide rational
support for acquiescence to oppressive neighbors, laws, and regimes. If
and when this does occur, then the Buddhist teaching of nonviolence can
be distorted into a teaching of nonaction and passivity, and be subject
to criticism as a failure of courage and justice.
If the truth is that the
cosmos is simply indifferent to human questions of merit and justice,
that truth makes it all the more important that human beings attend to
these matters themselves. If justice is a human concept, invented and
evolving in human minds and culture, and no where else, then it is up to
us alone to see that we follow through on it. If justice is not
structured into the universe itself, then it will have been a
substantial mistake to leave it up to the universe to see that justice
is done. Although, given our finitude, human justice will always be
imperfect, it may be all the justice we have. Moreover, the fact that
religious traditions, including Buddhism, have claimed otherwise may be
insufficient reason to accept the assertion of a cosmic justice beyond
the human as the basis for our actions in the world.
A third area of inquiry
in which to engage the concept of karma concerns the nature of the
reward or consequence that might be expected to follow from morally
relevant actions. In pursuing this line of questioning, I will be
employing a distinction borrowed from Alasdair MacIntyre that is now
common to contemporary ethics between goods that are externally or
contingently related to a given practice, and goods that are internal to
a practice and that cannot be acquired in any other way.5 Because the
practice under consideration here is any morally relevant action, we
want to distinguish between goods or rewards that may accompany that
moral act, but which are only contingently and externally related to it,
and rewards that are directly linked to the practice, available through
no other means, and therefore internal to that specific practice.
If we look at a single
act, say an act of extraordinary generosity or kindness, such as when
someone goes far out of her way to help someone else through a problem
that he has brought upon himself, we can see many possibilities for
rewards that might accrue through some contingency entailed in that
relation. The person helped may in fact be wealthy, and offer a large
sum of money in grateful reciprocity. Members of his family may honor
the practitioner of kindness, and her reputation in the community for
compassion and character might grow. She may become known as a citizen
of extraordinary integrity, which could lead to all kinds of indirect
rewards. These are all good consequences, and all deserved, but also all
contingent outcomes, all goods that are external to the moral act
itself. They may or may not be forthcoming. Indeed, on occasion
contingent misunderstanding may give rise to exactly the opposite
outcome -- the same act of generosity may be misunderstood, resented,
reviled, or lead to a denigrated reputation that the person never
overcomes.
The rewards or goods
internal to that act of kindness are directly related to the act, and
aren’t contingent on anything but the act. When we act generously, we do
something incremental to our character -- we shape ourselves slightly
further into a person who understands how to act generously, is inclined
to do so, and does so with increasing ease. We etch that way of behaving
just a little more firmly into our character, into who we are. That is
true whether the act is positive or negative in character.6 Generosity,
when it becomes an acquired feature of our character, becomes a virtue,
in fact one of the central Buddhist virtues, the first of the six
perfections, for example. “A virtue is an acquired human quality the
possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those
goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively
prevents us from achieving any such goods.”7 This is to say that acts of
generosity may or may not give rise to external goods like rewards of
money or prestige, but they do give rise to a transformation in
character that makes us generous, kind, and concerned about the
well-being of others. Internal goods derive naturally from the practice
as cause.
Our question, then, is
what kinds of rewards, or goods, does the doctrine of karma correlate to
virtuous or nonvirtuous acts, and how should we assess that dimension of
the doctrine? Familiarity with the tradition prevents us from giving a
univocal answer to this question: different texts and different teachers
promise many different kinds of rewards for karmically significant acts,
depending on who they are and who they happen to be addressing. Both
internal and external goods are commonly brought into play. From acts of
generosity we get everything from the virtue of generosity as an
internal good to great wealth, an external good, with a variety of
specific alternatives in between. Teachers often lean heavily one way or
the other, from emphasis on external goods such as health and wealth to
a strict focus on the internal goods of character, the development of
virtues like wisdom and compassion. Consider this example from the Dalai
Lama, where he is primarily interested in external goods. “As a result
of stealing,” he writes, “one will lack material wealth.”8 Because we
all know that successful thieves and corporate criminals may or may not
live their lives lacking in material wealth, we can only agree with this
claim insofar as we assume that the author is here referring to an
afterlife, some life beyond the end of this one. That is to say that
only the metaphysics of rebirth can make this statement plausible.
Otherwise, the doctrine of karma cannot truthfully guarantee such an
outcome of external rewards.
Had he been focused on
internal goods, he might have said that, as a result of stealing, one
will have deeply troubled relations to other people, as well as a
distorted relation to material goods. As a result of stealing one will
find compassion and intimacy more difficult, be further estranged from
the society in which one lives, and feel isolated and unable to trust
others. As a result of stealing, one will become even more likely to
commit other unhealthy acts, and may ultimately find oneself in an
unfulfilled and diminished existence. These results of the act of
stealing have a direct relation to the act; every act pushes one further
in some direction of character formation or another, and further
instantiates us in some particular relationship to the world. External
goods, while certainly important, cannot be so easily guaranteed, except
insofar as one offers that guarantee metaphysically by referring to
lives beyond the current one.
Although, promises of
personal rebirth aside, there would appear to be no necessary connection
between moral achievement and external rewards, there is a sense in
which moral achievement does often make external rewards more likely,
even if this is never a relation of necessity. This is true because the
more human beings enter the equation, the more likely it is that a human
sense of justice will intervene, drawing some connection between virtue
and reward, or sin and suffering. People who characteristically treat
others with kindness and just consideration are often treated kindly
themselves, although not always. Those who are frequently mean spirited
and selfish are often treated with distain. Honesty in business often
pays off in the form of trusting, faithful customers, while the habit of
cheating customers will often come back to haunt the merchant. These
dimensions of karma and of ethical relations are clear to us, and we are
thankful that they exist. But it would seem that their existence is
human and social, rather than structured into the cosmos.
Therefore, all we can
say is that things often work this way, not that they always do, or that
they must. Sometimes unscrupulous businessmen thrive; on occasion,
kindness and honesty go completely unrewarded. These occurrences make it
impossible for us to claim a necessary relation between moral merit and
external forms of reward. Although it is clearly true that to some
extent virtue is its own reward, what we cannot claim is that other
kinds of reward are meted out in the same way. Evidence shows us that
they are not, even if the human exercise of justice often directs
external rewards towards those who are deserving.
Let me summarize the
forgoing by saying: how you comport yourself ethically has at least
three ramifications: (1) it shapes your character and helps determine
who or what you become; (2) it helps shape others and the society in
which you live, now and into the future; and (3) it encourages others to
treat you in ways that correspond to your character -- they will often
do onto you as you have done onto them, although not always. The first
and second outcomes can be counted as goods internal to ethical action;
our actions do shape us and they do have an effect on the world. The
third is external, that is, contingent, in that it may or may not follow
from the ethical act. The more human justice there is, the more the
distribution of external goods is likely to match the extent of our
merit.
Thus, insofar as we can
gather evidence on this matter, some dissociation between merit and
external goods is important to maintain. Although good acts do lead to
the development of good character, being good does not always or
necessarily lead to a life of good fortune. Therefore, if there is a
contingent relation between external goods as rewards and merit, it
would be wise to articulate a system of ethics and a doctrine of karma
that do not rely heavily on this relation in spite of the longstanding
Buddhist tradition of doing so for purposes of moral motivation.
The fourth and final
dimension of the concept of karma that I want to examine is the extent
to which karma can be adequately conceived as a consequence or destiny
that is individual, as opposed to one that is social or collective.
Although there are a few interesting places in Buddhist philosophy where
a collective dimension to karma is broached, in Asanga and Vasubandhu
for example, I think that it is true to say that this concept has been
overwhelmingly understood in individual terms, that is, that the karma
produced by my acts is mine primarily, rather than ours collectively.9
For the most part, references to karma in contemporary Buddhist
literature follow the same individualized pattern. From my point of
view, there are serious philosophical difficulties with this way of
understanding the impact of our lives, however. Perhaps most strikingly,
the view that my acts and their repercussions remain enclosed in a
personal continuum that never dissipates into the larger society and
continues to be forever “mine” reinforces a picture of the world as
composed of a large number of discreet and isolated souls, a view that a
great deal of Buddhist thought has sought to undermine. The articulation
of this view among the Jains, in Samkhya, and others, however, clearly
shows the powerful impact of the concern for ultimate individual destiny
in the Indian intellectual/religious world around the time that Buddhism
was developing its vision.
Although the primary
direction of Buddhist thinking may have been to undercut the entire
question of ultimate individual destiny through the alternative
possibility of no self, the question has continued to surface and to
demand an answer. It may very well be, however, that Buddhist attempts
to satisfy the desire behind the question by offering the concept of
rebirth to allay fears about the continuation of individual existence
has the additional and unwanted effect of blocking further development
along the alternative paths clearly laid out in the early teachings. It
stands in the way of the achievement of a broader vision of the meanings
of no self, and a more effective and mature understanding of the ways
each of us continue to affect the future beyond our personal lives.
Personal anxieties about death are a powerful force in the mind, so
strong that they can prevent other impersonal and trans-individual
conceptions from rising to the cultural surface.
The line of thinking
that began to develop most explicitly in early Mahayana texts, which
imagined complex interrelations among individuals, recognized that the
consequences of any act in the world could not be easily localized and
isolated, and that effects radiate out from causes in an ultimately
uncontainable fashion, rendering lines of partition between selves and
between all entities in the world significantly more porous and
malleable than we tend to assume. Expanding the image of the
Bodhisattva, Buddhists began to see how lines of influence and outcome
co-mingle, along family lines and among friends, co-workers, and
co-citizens, such that the future for others arises dependent in part
upon my acts, and I arise dependent in part upon the shaping powers of
the accumulating culture around me. This type of thinking, based heavily
on the expanding meaning of dependent origination, was forcefully
present in several dimensions of Buddhist ethics. My suspicion, however,
is that we have yet to see the development of this aspect of Buddhism to
the extent of its potential, and that it has been continually redirected
by what must have seemed more pressing questions about individual
destiny.
As an example of a
possible pattern of redirection, consider the development of merit
transfer, the idea that one might give the rewards from one of your own
good acts to another person whose karmic status might be in greater
jeopardy. Mahayana Buddhists were, of course, particularly attracted to
this idea; they sought ways to develop an unselfish concern for the
spiritual welfare of all sentient beings, and focused intently on
methods enabling them to get out from under the self-centered
implications of a personal spiritual quest. The idea that they could
pursue the good in their own quest, and then in a compassionate and
unselfish meditative gesture, contemplate giving to others whatever good
had resulted from that act, seemed an excellent middle path between
selfish personal quests and compassion for others. But one effect of
this teaching was that it tended to picture the karma or the goodness of
an act as a self-enclosed package that was theirs alone, and that could
be generously given away at some later point if circumstances warranted.
As a meditative device used to prevent individuals from coveting and
hoarding their own spiritual merit, this may on occasion have been
effective. But a problem looms when a skillful meditative device is
taken out of that contemplative setting of mental self-cultivation and
treated as a picture of what really does happen when we do good things.
It is important to
remember that many Buddhist moral teachings are not first of all
prescriptions about how to treat others, but rather prescriptions for
how to treat your own mind in meditation so that you become the kind of
moral person that the tradition envisioned. While it may be very good
for you, having done a good deed, to humble yourself in meditation on it
by picturing yourself giving the merit of that act to others, it is not
good for you to misunderstand the moral enterprise by reifying the terms
and processes operative within it. What kind of magical or supernatural
entity would karma have to be to make such a gift of merit make sense?
Focusing so intently on your own moral merit, it is also inevitable that
you come to realize that donating your merit to another is itself a
really good and generous act, one that can’t help but win you lots of
good merit.
What began as a way to
drop the meritorious self from consideration, ends up slipping it in
through the back door in such a way that the entire specter of merit
transfer becomes yet another way to picture yourself as deserving of
merit. When seen from the outside, this is doubly problematic, because
the one to whom you are supposedly being generous, in fact, gets nothing
because, after all, this is mental exercise, while you picture yourself
doubling your own merit, thereby cultivating exactly the pride and
self-satisfaction that you wanted to overcome. If the end pursued is
understood in terms of humility and unselfishness, entangling yourself
in a mental economy of merit calculation and exchange is not likely to
be effective. The practices of merit transfer just fit too smoothly into
old habits of self-concern, and all too readily block the development of
kinds of selflessness envisioned in the bodhisattva ideal. The literal
and highly reified conception of karma often presupposed in the
practices of merit transfer are philosophically problematic, as well as
counterproductive to the effort to understand karma as a viable
possibility for contemporary ethics.
There are a variety of
ways in which an individualized concept of karma continues to perpetuate
itself in spite of a wealth of ideas in the Buddhist tradition that
would mitigate against it. The basic ideas of impermanence, dependent
origination, no self, and later extensions of these ideas such as
emptiness are prominent among them. But all of these ideas run aground
on the concept of rebirth, and it is there that karma is most
problematic. All four critical questions raised in this paper about
karma derive their impact from the association that karma has with
rebirth.
The question of rebirth
and afterlife is as complicated as it is interesting, and therefore not
one that I’ll take up in this setting. But let me simply indicate the
direction philosophical questioning on this issue might take -- just two
points. First, if this really is an open question about what happens to
people after they die, then we would expect that evidence will need to
play at least some role, and we would assume that scientific
investigation is the best way to gather and assess it. But here we
encounter an unsurprising division between pious Hindus and Buddhists
who write books gathering what seems to them the incontrovertible
evidence for reincarnation, and Western scientists who, seeing no
evidence whatsoever, don’t even raise the question. This is to say that,
constrained by a variety of traditional and modern doctrines, this
question hasn’t been asked in a serious way, both out of deference to
religious belief and because the question itself eludes conclusive
response because what it pursues is by definition beyond the world in
which we live, that is, fully metaphysical. That leaves most of us in
the position of needing to sort out the possibilities ourselves, but in
the meantime the most honest and therefore spiritually and
intellectually compelling response is to admit that we simply don’t know
what happens to us after we die. Better, it would seem, to allow the
mystery and gravity of human mortality to press upon us, and to
stimulate our asking the kinds of questions that reflect our deepest
human concerns, rather than to leap in one direction or the other on the
question of afterlife.
The second point,
however, is the difficulty that Buddhists have had historically in
getting a doctrine of rebirth to cohere with their other central values.
Those of us who have read through Abhidharma literature are familiar
with the contortions that Buddhist intellectuals went through in the
process of explaining what rebirth might mean in view of the Buddhist
claim that there is no permanent or substantial self because all things
are both impermanent and dependent on other impermanent conditions.
Wherever in Buddhist thought rebirth is given a strong and substantial
role, no self and other dimensions of the teachings are reduced in
significance. Wherever the teaching of no self and related doctrinal
elements are given strong and consistent application, very little is
left that rebirth could mean. Philosophers in the future will continue
to raise questions about the tension between these two early and
important dimensions in Buddhist thought, and to examine what
possibilities for thought were left unexplored in the Buddhist tradition
due to logical difficulties on this one issue. For some, it has already
been tempting to suspect that the idea of rebirth in Buddhism is an
intellectual relapse, a place within the teachings where practitioners
were simply unable or unwilling to consider the radical consequences of
their teachings, and where they may have fallen prey to the dangers of
grasping for the immortal self, or for the kinds of permanence and
security that Buddhist psychology warned against so perceptively. These
two areas, I suspect, will be the places where the debate about rebirth
and its role in the workings of karma will tend to focus. But we’ll see;
these are questions that require cautious, delicate treatment because
they are located close to the life force that motivates human beings.
But that’s exactly why they need to be raised as real questions
In several respects,
rebirth stands in the way of our understanding karma in purely ethical
terms. Rebirth encourages us (1) to assume a concept of cosmic justice
for which we have insufficient evidence; (2) to ignore issues of justice
in this life on the grounds of speculation about future lives; (3) to
focus our hopes on external rewards for our actions, like wealth and
status in a future life rather than on the construction of character in
this one; and (4) to conceive of our lives in strictly individual terms,
as a personal continuum through many lives, rather than collectively,
where individuals share in a communal destiny, contributing their lives
and efforts to that collective destiny. Although at the time when
Buddhism first emerged, karma and rebirth continued to be linked
together in order to make the newly emerging domain of ethics viable,
today, ironically, given the cultural evolution of ethical
understanding, karma may need to be disconnected from the metaphysics of
rebirth in order to continue the development of Buddhist ethics.10 If
the early Buddhists did ethicize the concept of karma by lifting it out
of the sphere of religious ritual by applying it to all of our morally
relevant actions, then carrying through on that ethicization will
require that the link between karma and rebirth be questioned, perhaps
altered. Among Buddhists today, educated in a world of science and
favorably disposed to contemporary standards for the articulation of
truth, a naturalized concept of karma without supernatural preconditions
will more likely be both persuasive and motivationally functional.11
How would we develop
such a concept? Here are just a few suggestions. A naturalistic theory
of karma would treat choice and character as mutually determining --
each arising dependent on the other. It would show how the choices you
make, one by one, shape your character, and how the character that you
have constructed, choice by choice, sets limits on the range of
possibilities that you will be able to consider in each future decision.
Karma implies that once you have made a choice and acted on it, it will
always be with you, and you will always be the one who at that moment
and under those conditions embraced that path of action. The past, on
this view, is never something that once happened to you and is now over;
instead, it is the network of causes and conditions that has already
shaped you and that is right now setting conditions for every choice and
move you make. From the very moment of an act on, you are that choice,
which has been appropriated into your character along with countless
others. In this light human freedom becomes highly visible, and awesome
in its gravity, but is noticeable only to one who has realized the
far-reaching and irreversible impact on oneself and others of choices
made, of karma.
The concept of karma
brings this pattern of freedom in self-cultivation clearly to the fore,
and does so with great insight and natural subtly. It highlights a
structure of personal accountability in which every act contains its own
internal, natural rewards or consequences, even if Buddhists sometimes
succumbed to the temptation to offer a variety of external rewards as
well. Although money does talk, promising it when it may or may not be
forthcoming is a questionable strategy of motivation. Better to teach,
as Buddhists have, that the best things in life are free, and that the
very best of these is the freedom to cultivate oneself into someone who
is wise, insightful, compassionate, and magnanimous.12 This freedom,
however, operates under strict and always fluctuating conditions. A
mature concept of karma would encourage people to recognize the finitude
of freedom and choice, and all of the ways we are shaped by forces far
beyond our control. Although always attempting to extend our ethical
imaginations, and therefore our freedom, failure simultaneously to
recognize the encompassing forces of nature, society, and history places
us in a precarious position, and renders our choices naive. Our choices
and our lives originate dependent on these larger forces, and in view of
them, mindfulness and reverence are appropriate responses.
If the solitary ethical
decisions we have been focusing on so far have the power to move us in
the direction of greater forms of human excellence, then how much more
so the unconscious “non-choices” that we make every day in the form of
habits and customs that deepen over time and engrave their mark into our
character. Some accounts of karma are exceptionally insightful in that
their understanding of character development takes full account of the
enormous importance of ordinary daily practice or customs of behavior,
what we habitually do during the day often without reflection or choice
-- the ways we do our work and manage our time, the ways we daydream, or
cultivate resentment, or lose ourselves in distractions, down to the
very way we eat and breathe.
This is clearly a strong
point in Buddhist ethics. On this understanding of karma, which was
closely related to the development of meditation, ethics is largely a
matter of daily practice, understood as the self-conscious cultivation
of ordinary life and mentality towards the approximation of an ideal
defined by images of human excellence, the awakened arhats and
bodhisattvas.13 To an extent not found in other religious and
philosophical traditions, Buddhists saw that ethics is only rarely about
difficult and monumental decisions, and that, in preparing yourself for
life, it is much more important to focus on what you do with yourself
moment by moment than it is to attempt to imagine how you will solve the
major moral crises when they arrive. They seem to have realized that it
is only through disciplined practices of daily self-cultivation that you
would be in a mental position to handle the big issues when they do come
up. They also claimed, insightfully, that the self is malleable and open
to this kind of ethical transformation, and here we see the impact of
the concept of no-self as it was developed in various dimensions of the
tradition.
Moreover, the Buddhist
doctrine of no-self is one of the best among several places in the
teachings where we can begin to see beyond the individual interpretation
of karma that has dominated the tradition so far. If karma is to be a
truly comprehensive teaching about human actions and their effects,
extensive development of all of the ways in which the effects of our
acts radiate into other selves and into social structures will need to
be grafted onto the doctrine of karma as it currently stands. This
extension of the doctrine has already begun, however, and will not be
difficult to pursue because it can be grounded on the extraordinary
Mahayana teaching of emptiness, the Buddhist vision of the
interpenetration of all beings. Following this vision, we can imagine a
collective understanding of karma that overcomes limitations deriving
from the concept’s original foundation in the individualized
spirituality of early Buddhist monasticism.
A naturalized
philosophical account of the Buddhist idea of karma can, it seems to me,
insightfully reflect these and other dimensions of our human situation.
Separated from elements of supernatural thinking that have been
associated with karma since its inception, its basic tenets of freedom,
decision, and accountability are impressive, and clearly show us
something important about the human situation, including the project of
self-construction, both individually and collectively conceived. I
conclude, therefore, imagining elements in the doctrine of karma having
the potential to be truly effective in the effort to design concepts of
ethical education that are both honest to the requirements of thinking
in our time, and profoundly enabling in the quest for human excellence.
Notes
1Aṅguttara
Nikāya: iv, 77. Return to text
2See Susan Neiman, Evil
in Modern Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Return
to text
3Richard Gombrich and
Gananath Obeyesekere among them. Return to text
4Although not a
historian of early Indian culture, I suspect that the ethicization of
the concept of karma was occurring not just in Buddhist monastic circles
but more widely in other avant-garde segments of Indian culture at the
same time. Return to text
5Alaisdair MacIntyre,
After Virtue, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 188.
Return to text
6The first thing that
accrues from an act of this sort is that someone is helped, something
good has been done to the world out beyond the practitioner. But my
focus here is on the rewards that come to the agent. Return to text
7Alaisdair MacIntyre,
After Virtue, p. 191. Return to text
8Dalai Lama, The Way to
Freedom: Core Teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. San Francisco: Harper,
1994. p. 100. Return to text
9See William Waldron,
The Buddhist Unconscious, London: Routledge/Curzon, 2003, pp. 160-169.
Return to text
10In a book just
released as this essay came to completion, Robert Thurman articulates
exactly the opposite point on the concept of rebirth: that without a
belief in individual immortality -- a theory of the soul -- a fully
ethical life is not possible. While respecting the motivation and
sincerity of those who do consider the idea of rebirth to be essential
both to Buddhism and to enlightened life, I disagree with the arguments
provided, and find adherence to contemporary standards of critical
thinking the most compelling consideration. See Infinite Life: Seven
Virtues for Living Well, New York: Riverhead Books, 2004. Return to text
11Winston L. King
explores the question of the separability of karma and rebirth,
concluding that “a doctrine of karmic rebirth is not essential to a
viable and authentic Buddhist ethic in the West,” in “A Buddhist Ethic
Without Karmic Rebirth,” in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Volume 1,
1994. Return to text
12The question of what
to do about people who can only be motivated by promises of external
rewards is an important social question, but not one within the scope of
a philosophical effort to reflect on the truth of the matter or on what
the rest of us should believe for motivational purposes. Return to text
13For the connection
between meditation and Buddhist ethics, see Georges Dreyfus,“Meditation
as Ethical Activity,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Vol. 2, 1995. Return
to text
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Source: http://jbe.gold.ac.uk/
Update: 01-12-2004